This set of images exposes details on small and crumpled-looking Helene.
Large portions of this Trojan moon of Dione appear to have been blasted
away by impacts.
Cassini passed within 50,000 kilometers (31,000 miles) of Helene (32
kilometers, or 20 miles across) on Aug. 17, 2006, when these images were
acquired. The views were obtained over the course of an hour, and are
presented here in reverse order (i.e., the leftmost image was taken
latest).
The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera. As presented here, the views were acquired at
distances ranging from 62,000 to 51,000 kilometers (39,000 to 32,000
miles) from Helene and at a Sun-Helene-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 111
to 120 degrees. Image scale is 375 to 300 meters (1,230 to 984 feet) per
pixel, from left to right.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
